I'm Baaaack

Just a quick note to alert any die-hard Inbedded Autonomy fans that I've opened a new blog, which you can find here. Look forward to seeing you at my new URL!

The End of An Era

We're back from an extended and busy romp around 2 of the 50 states and there are lots of changes in our lives. Nicolò has found his toes and loves to grab hold of them, though is frustrated by the fact that he can't make them quite reach his mouth. Marco took advantage of our holiday in Silicon Vally to make the transition from PC to Mac and will never look back. I will soon cease to be a food source and will be able to drink a whole glass of wine (useful as I will be able to drown my sadness about the passing my enforced tri-hourly intimacy with the little one). Nicolò laughs out loud, is eating his first solid foods, and will soon move to his own room. I'm facing the relatively imminent prospect of going back to work, and as a consequence have started checking my work email to make sure I don't miss things I will need to know when I walk into the office after more than a year on 19 May. Etc.

So it seems only appropriate that all of these changes be marked by another change: the end of my blog. As all of you know, the blog came to being to help me pass the long hours, days and weeks while I was on bedrest. Not only did it do wonders for my sanity, I enjoyed writing it and getting back into the creative / journalistic writing which used to take up so much of my time. But the blog made a slightly awkward transition to my post bed-rest life, and that is because once I no longer needed it to get through my day, it became more burdensome to write.

It's a bit strange for me to think that by closing the blog now, it won't be here to tell you about what Nico is up to at 6 months, or to comment on the eventual outcome of the US elections, or the resolution of Mugabe's current electoral crisis. But I'm sure that there is another blog somewhere in my future. So farewell, dear readers. Hope to meet you somewhere out there in the blogosphere again one day.

California Dreamin....

...on such a winter's day. Inbedded Autonomy is on the way to San Francisco tomorrow morning for the start of a three week holiday in the Bay Area and Texas. So no posts for now - I'm taking a much needed break!

My Favourite (Academic) Autocrat: Condoleezza Rice

A while back, on a previous My Favourite Autocrat post, someone asked whether I had ever had Condoleezza Rice as a professor during my time at Stanford. The answer is yes, and seeing as I'm headed to Palo Alto, home of my alma mater, on Saturday morning to kick off a long-overdue holiday with M. and N., I thought that it was about time to write a little tribute to Condi here in My Favourite Autocrat.

By the time that I got to Stanford, Condi was provost, and didn't teach as much as she had done in previous years. Nonetheless, she did do so occasionally, and she had a cult following amongst the "IR boys" (my nickname for the group of power hungry young men who dominated my International Relations major and later my MA programme in International Policy), who wanted to get on her good side presumably to secure future posts in the eventual Bush II administration. My encounters with her were a bit accidental: she guest lectured a series of seminars in a class I took during my masters degree called "US Foreign Policy," a class led by a professor who had served as a foreign policy advisor under the first Clinton administration. This was in 1999 when she was already advising Bush II's campaign, and looked likely to secure a major position in his administration if he won.

While teaching, she told us stories of foreign policy experiences she had had serving under Bush I, where she worked as a special advisor on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. There was a fantastic story about her physically restraining a drunken Boris Yeltsin from entering a room where the reunification of Germany was being discussed amongst Bush and European heads of state. She was both down to earth, and a good teacher. She's a very charming woman - always impeccably dressed and exceptionally well-spoken as well as intelligent. Had I not disagreed with many of her ideas, I would have found her a perfect role-model, seeing as at the time I was interested in working in US foreign policy when I graduated.

My disagreements with her then were not strictly political, they were more theoretical. She belongs to a school of international relations theory called Realism, which argues that the state operates in the context of international anarchy and therefore has to do whatever it deems necessary to protect its own national interest. It is a highly power-based theory, and broadly speaking overlooks the role of domestic politics, ideas, international norms and institutions in the formulation of policy. Her research had always prioritised these ideas.

Her politics instead have been more variable. Condoleezza Rice switched from the Democratic Party to the Republicans in the early 1980s, and served as a foreign policy advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart in the 1984 elections. At Stanford, the urban legend was that she did so because she realised that she would be in a stronger position of power as a black woman in the "daddy" party than in the "mommy party" (while I've never read anything that attributes her switch to this reason, it wouldn't have been at all out of character).

What I didn't expect when I was taught by her that she would go on to apply her favourite theoretical paradigm to actual foreign policy in the Bush administration. It is no wonder that Bush has found himself in a quagmire in Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan: if your advisers believe that nothing other than power is important in determining outcomes in international policy, you would indeed find yourself believing that you could waltz into Iraq, overthrow Saddam, instate a democracy and be home in time for dinner. In a theory where the domestic context does not matter and there is no need for international support or the blessing of international institutions, the outcome of the Iraqi war was a foregone conclusion.

I think that Condi, along with several other senior administration officials like Dick Cheney and Donal Rumsfeld , is largely to blame for the mess that Bush has left around the globe. She recklessly applied something that looks plausible as a theoretical paradigm to real world international politics, creating a disaster in her wake. And that's why she qualifies for the My Favourite Autocrat column.

Age Discrimination

Yesterday I called the chic hotel I had booked in Big Sur for one of the nights during our upcoming holiday to California (which we can afford because given the exchange rates: traveling to the US with British pounds in your pocket these days is a bit like visiting a developing country) to make sure that they would put a crib in the room for Nicolò. The woman informed me that they don't allow anyone under the age of 18 onto the property - obviously a problem since Nico falls somewhat short of that age criteria. I guess I should have asked at the outset whether children were allowed in the hotel (it being a nice spa and all), but this being our first real trip with the little one, it didn't even occur to me. M. was outraged at the fact that they prohibit people with children from staying, and having thought about it a bit more, it is a form of discrimination - both against the kids and the parents of those kids.

Now I'm sure that the childless of you out there think that there is a good reason for this: no crying infants in the next room in the middle of the night or 5 year-olds running around the deck of the swimming pool while you're sipping a daiquiri and working on your tan. But it seems to perpetuate two crappy ideas. The first is that families have to be kept separate from others, as if having children isn't a normal part of life. I've always appreciated that in Italy and other Latin countries, children are always around at restaurants and other social events. Parents don't get babysitters to go out to dinner, they bring the kids along and let them sleep in their strollers if need be. Contrast that with Anglo-Saxon countries where many restaurants have, again, no child policies.

The second bad idea which underlies this policy is that parents cannot continue to be people who both need and enjoy big fluffy hotel beds and daiquiri's just as much as the rest of society. All the sudden, I should only want to stay in hotels with pancakes made in the shape of Mickey Mouse. Fortunately, I haven't renounced my sense of taste and still would like to stay at a chic California spa. Unfortunately, unless I can bribe the dear friends we'll be staying with for most of the week when we're not in hotels to watch Nico for the night, such an option is no longer open to me. I wonder: do we have a winnable court case here on discrimination grounds? Any of my lawyer-type friends out there want to weigh in?

7 updated, but still deadly, sins

Depending on how lapsed a Catholic you are, you probably remember the 7 deadly sins: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Today, however, the Catholic Church introduced a new, updated and globalised list of deadly sins which is intended to add to the original seven. They include polluting, genetic engineering, obscene wealth, taking drugs, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice. Happily, I'm not at much risk of going to hell through possession of obscene wealth, but I definitely am at risk for failing to recycle a wine bottle or eating green beans grown in Kenya while I live in London (though I reckon that one could cut both ways if it turns out that the bean growers are working in a cooperative and are becoming less poor through the sale of the beans). The BBC report on this that I watched this evening cynically commented that the impetus for updating the list of sins is to get Catholics back into confessionals - new sins creates new sinners. Looking around the world, however, I would have thought that there were already enough sinners under the old criteria to keep the confessionals chock-full if people were interested in continuing to actively practice Catholicism.

Going to the civil wedding venue...

We spent the weekend at the touching and very elegant wedding of two close friends here in Central London. Nico attended his first wedding (other than ours, where he sneaked in with me), and even had his own place card at the table located between mine and M.'s, which we saved. He was very well behaved throughout the ceremony and reception, and was whisked home at 8pm by my dear brother and sister-in-law, which was intended to give M. and I some time to party with our friends without a care. But we didn't get wild, we just realised how tired we were, and tried to rouse ourselves to stay on the dance floor a bit longer so as not to look lame to our friends without children...

Dream Report: Guerrilla Warfare and a White Board

I don't get many uninterrupted nights of sleep. In fact, it's more accurate to say that I don't get any. Therefore the number of dreams that I have and remember has declined dramatically since Nico was born, which is a shame, as I used to have some great dreams. Nonetheless, every once and a while I wake up for a 4am feeding having just dreamed something, and last night was one of those nights.

Marco and I are in a black cab, going home. In front of us there is some sort of disturbance - a road block. As we approach I see that the people blocking the road are armed. It is a rebel group that has taken over the streets of our relatively posh London suburb, Maida Vale, and are forcing passing traffic to get out of cars and face questioning.

Here's the part where it becomes obvious that the girl with a PhD about international financial market risk is the one having the dream: it turns out that the rebels are fighting against transnational capital markets and are particularly concerned about HSBC's dominance as a financial institution. They take us into an interrogation room and produce copies of our CVs.

They read international finance all over my CV and begin to accuse me of working with the enemy. I calmly explain that my work is aimed at reforming international capital markets and the institutions that govern them. Seeing the perplexed looks on their faces, I get brave, and venture a guess that they actually don't understand much about finance. So I offer to teach them a thing or two.

Conveniently enough, the room adjacent to the interrogation suite is set up for teaching, white boards, overhead projectors and all (and bears a strong resemblance to the LSE). I bring all of the guerrillas into the room, and start an introductory lesson on the globalisation of financial capital, crises and reform. They ask many questions, I teach them a thing or two, and save Maida Vale from a protracted period of guerrilla warfare with those who would undo the internationalisation of capital.

Ancient culture and the crotch grab

As I am married to an Italian, this article caught my attention while browsing through the online magazine Slate.com. It explains why Italian men grab their crotch to ward off bad luck (linked to protecting the genitals, and therefore future progeny, from the gaze of the evil eye), and a number of other interesting and tangentially related things. Not really relevant to anything at all, but a fun little thing to read if you're still awake after midnight (which I am) and looking for something to do other than finish your Italian homework (which I am). It could almost be considered on topic, except that I am supposed to be reading in Italian, not about Italians.

Interests: Literature, Travel and Drowning

The adventure to find suitable childcare for Nicolò continues. This afternoon around 5pm I posted an advertisement for a part-time nanny on a London networking site that is often used for finding childcare. I have already received more than 20 responses, most with CVs and long cover letters about how much they love children. Amongst these responses are some hilarious writing samples. A young French woman writes to tell us about her family in the south of France, including her small dog named Valia, who she says "is a little bit crazy!" (exclamation point in original). A person who describes her English as "reasoned" (instead, I imagine, of reasonable). And, the inspiration for the title of the post, an Eastern European woman who reports her interests at the bottom of her CV as "literature, travel and drowning." Who knows whether she meant to write drawing, if she confused diving with drowning, or some other as of yet unimagined possibility. I'm not sure if we're going to invite her for an interview (what if she really is interested in drowning?!?), but either way I'm going to write back and tell her to change the interests section of her CV.

Babe Magnet

Marco spent a whole afternoon out in London with Nicolò alone, leading to another observation about the differences between the world of fatherhood and motherhood. When I go out with Nicolò, I generally attract the attention of other exhausted looking mothers looking to share battle stories about their lack of sleep and old women who give me advice about diapers and the like. As a man alone with an adorable baby strapped to his chest, you won't be surprised to hear that Marco instead generated the interest of a much broader swath of the female species (it doesn't hurt that he stopped in to a chic cafe on High Street Kensington to have a mojito while Nicolò had his bottle of milk, something I don't do because I can't drink cocktails while I'm the source of aforementioned milk). Marco claims both that all the attention they received was directed at Nicolò, and that the baby was the only one doing the flirting with his coos and big blue eyes...

To Nader... With Love

A fail-proof contraceptive method

Forget condoms, the pill and even abstinence. Yesterday my brother and his wife discovered the best form of contraception: babysitting. They looked after Nicolò on their own for the first time last night while Marco and I had some time off for dorks: a seminar at the London School of Economics followed by dinner with the faculty and PhD students of his department. Brendan and Sabrina live just up the street, and are frequently at our house for dinner or just to say hi to the their little nephew. As they are completely smitten and always seem to see him at his cutest, they usually leave the house saying to one another "let's have a baby." Last night though, after being alone with him between 4 and 10:30pm, they changed their tune. When we arrived, the baby was asleep, well-fed and in his pjs, but they looked exhausted. Dinner (a take-away from the local Indian) was only partially eaten, and apparently in shifts. Sabrina said that they hadn't had the chance to even ask how each other's day was; Brendan said that there was a whole series of hours where Nicolò would cry the minute you stopped singing to him. And both agreed that maybe it would be best to wait a bit longer before having a baby...

An American is Born

Today, Nicolò is officially an American. Technically, he has been an American since the moment he was born, but it was only today after several hours of standing in lines and turning in forms that he has the paperwork to prove his right to call America the motherland. I called the American Embassy in London just after he was born (in December) to get him an American passport and found out that I couldn't have an appointment until today, 27 February. Apparently there has been a boom in American births in London which has backed the system up quite a bit. Must be an increase in Americans abroad seeking political asylum from the Bush presidency...

Cheap Bush-bashing aside, the real story is that after braving the concrete and barbed wire prison that is the American Embassy (fear of terror attacks runs high), Nicolò is now the proud owner of a document certifying that he is American even though he was born abroad (adorned with eagles and official seals and coloured in the obligatory red, white and blue), a passport, and a social security number. The passport comes complete with a picture (good for five years!), height (2 feet), weight (11 lbs), hair and eye colour (blond and blue, but both likely to change). A bit ridiculous, but also amusing. Equally amusing that we assume that social security will still exist by the time he would collect it.

So even though he doesn't yet know that peanut butter is great and that Canadians are not, he's a real American. And maybe it's just my imagination, but he seemed to enjoy my rendition of the Star Spangled Banner (yes, I admit, I have sung it to him in the past) more today than ever. It made me, and I think him, feel a little patriotic.

He's Baaacckkk....

The mouse is back. Actually, it's not the same mouse. The original mouse was found dead in the bookshelf (tucked into the cookbook section, of all places) just before Christmas. Mouse, The Sequel, was spotted last night in the living room, just days after the mouse guy came over and told me that we were "officially mouse free" and that we would never get a mouse again in the living room because they can sense that a previous mouse died there. Ha! Our year long mouse protection package fortunately means that the mouse "expert" will be back tomorrow morning to meet our new furry friend. Last night we didn't get much sleep - kept checking Nicolò's crib to make sure the mouse wasn't in there with him - but at least we didn't put the crib on our bed, like last time...